Exegy Journal Replay Addresses Electronic Trading

When it comes to electronic trading, timing is everything. To address that reality, Exegy Inc. this week introduced a managed service called Exegy Journal Replay.

“The capabilities of Exegy Journal Replay allow market participants to respond to competitive pressures to reduce latency and to improve execution quality, corporate mandates to bolster system stability and to lower operational risk, and regulatory requirements to prove the capacity and resiliency of trading systems,” said CEO James O'Donnell. 

O’Donnell added that Exegy clients had been requesting that the company enable precision testing of their applications and related infrastructure that already rely on Exegy market data appliances. Exegy Journal Replay is enabled by the company’s fully managed appliances, which sit at customer data centers and record raw market data packets from various real-time market data feeds.

The appliances timestamp each packet. Those timestamps, which are accurate to within 20 nanoseconds, enable the appliance to reproduce traffic patterns with high precision when replaying market data. This solution also scales to address varying traffic patterns. The ability to scale and synchronize across feeds is a differentiator for Exegy Journal Replay, according to CTO David Taylor.

The importance of solutions that address the unique aspects of market trading was illustrated several years ago following the so-called flash crash that sent the Dow down nearly 1,000 points within seconds. Every second – or even millisecond – can make a significant difference, whether you’re talking about the quality of delay-sensitive traffic, the end user experience with cloud-based services, or the ability to trade fairly (or quickly halt trade, when needed).

“Managed services are benefitting many firms by helping develop and maintain robust trading infrastructure at a low cost. As the industry landscape continues to evolve, technological advances have radically increased the speed of trading and transactions. Financial firms continue to demand low-latency market access and support for their entire trading infrastructure,” according to this article by The TABB Group LLC.